The Online Scam Playbook Is Changing — Here's What Platforms Can Do

Emily Jones · 2026-10-20

Online financial scams aren't some niche problem anymore. They've become a pervasive crime of the digital age, showing up across every kind of online intermediary service — including the biggest platforms and search engines we all use every day. A new study, commissioned in 2025 to support supervisory work under the Digital Services Act (DSA), takes a hard look at how these scams actually work. It maps the formats scammers use across platforms and weighs the strategies — existing and emerging — that could curb them. One thing worth noting up front: the study doesn't grade any specific company's compliance. It's a landscape analysis, not a report card. So what did it find? Let's break it down. ### Six flavors of financial fraud The researchers sorted online financial scams into six broad buckets: - Investment scams - Romance scams - E-commerce scams - Employment and collaboration scams - Unexpected gain scams - Disaster relief scams Two categories stood out as the most common and fastest-growing: investment scams and romance scams. But here's the twist — the lines between categories are blurring. Scammers increasingly stack methods on top of each other, borrowing a little from a romance con and a little from an investment pitch to build something harder to spot. ### The platform features scammers love Scams don't happen in a vacuum. They ride on the very features that make platforms useful. The study zeroes in on several of them: - Advertising systems - Recommender systems - Content moderation of organic content - Monetisation systems - App store content and private messaging functions - Inauthentic identities and account manipulation - Deceptive commercial content - Generative AI That last one deserves a pause. Generative AI is making it cheaper and faster to produce convincing fake profiles, pitches, and conversations at scale. There's another layer, too. Financial scams increasingly operate across multiple platforms at once, and they're propped up by organized criminal networks that sell tools and services to anyone willing to pay. In other words, the barrier to entry has dropped. You no longer need to be a skilled con artist — you just need to buy the right kit. > "The scam landscape is increasingly being redefined by overlapping methods across different categories." That quote captures the core challenge. When scams blend together and spread across services, a single-platform fix rarely solves the whole problem. ### What actually works to counter them The study also digs into countermeasures — what's already in place and what's emerging. The takeaway for business professionals is practical: no single fix does the job. Effective responses tend to combine stronger identity verification, better moderation of paid and organic content, and faster coordination between platforms when a scam campaign jumps from one service to another. For anyone running a platform, an ad system, or a marketplace, the message is clear. Scam prevention isn't just a trust-and-safety line item — it's a business risk. Users who get burned don't just lose money; they lose faith in the service that connected them to the scammer. The full study is available through the European Commission's publications office if you want the deep dive. But the headline is simple enough: the scam playbook is evolving fast, and the defenses have to evolve with it.